Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Silent Killer

“We’re manufacturing type-2 diabetes in the same way we would skin cancer if the guidance was for people to sit on the beach all day, every day,”

one in three adult Americans now has type-2 diabetes or pre-diabetes,

What’s worse, the rest of the world is mimicking our diet and following the lead of our diabetes guidelines...World Health Organization pinned the number of diabetics at 350 million, 70 million higher than previous estimates, and more than double the number from 1980.

“Diabetes, along with obesity, is looming as the biggest epidemic in human history,”

Food makers... pour 160 pounds of sugar per person per year into the food U.S. supply, a recipe for fat profit margins and waistlines both.

Most Insurance companies don’t cover nutritional counseling for prediabetics, even though this is the last chance to forestall the onset of a dietary disease.

Drug firms sell tens of billions of dollars worth of diabetes drugs every year to help us manage all that sugar. Diabetes will take its sweet time killing you, so you’ll be filling expensive prescriptions for years, if not decades, as it picks you apart.

THE SOLUTION LIES with you. If you’re among those with or threatened by type-2 diabetes, you can very likely beat the disease, starting with a diet overhaul.

The cornerstone of my anti-diabetes plan was the elimination of what had become my metabolic poison: excessive carbohydrates, especially simple sugars.

The sugar load that comes from snack foods and soda has been divorced from the fiber that once surrounded it in foods; and concentrated in forms, such as soda, that allow vast quantities to jolt the bloodstream, panicking the pancreas and leading to an over-secretion of insulin. Our metabolic systems weren’t designed to handle anywhere near that load, and our body’s ancient sensors for hunger and satiety are now easily tricked.

Fixing the problems of glucose intolerance and insulin resistance, which lead to chronically high and/or volatile blood sugar, and eventually type-2 diabetes, means learning basic truths about what you put in your body every day:

Control your carbs--or type-2 diabetes will control you... A low-carb diet is ideal for anyone who has type-2 diabetes or is at high risk for it.

Someone with prediabetes or diabetes should be wary of consuming more than 100 grams of carbs a day... and those carbs should come from healthy sources such as vegetables and and nuts. The more you exercise, the more carb-tolerant your body will become. If you want to consume more than 100 carbs grams a day, work out more to account for them.

Complex carbs, like simple sugars, can easily be over-consumed... a trickle of the wrong carbs is preferable to an avalanche of the better ones. Sure, whole-wheat bread falls lower on the glycemic index (GI) than white bread. Yet both products break down into glucose. The same goes for brown rice versus white rice. Consume a lot of even low-GI carbs, and your bloodstream can become overwhelmed by too much glucose.

Don’t assume you’re eating healthfully just because you’re not overweight. As it turns out, 10 to 15 percent of those with insulin resistance, the condition underlying type-2 diabetes, are not overweight. Among other populations, particularly in Asia, the percentage of normal-weight diabetics is actually much higher.